History of anatomy on show - from Da Vinci to graverobbings

It is somewhat ironic then that, in the days following Burke’s execution, thousands more filed through Edinburgh University to stare at his dissected body - the brain removed to enable further study of the skull for signs of “what makes a murderer” - before it was eventually stripped of its flesh and his skeleton placed on display in the anatomy museum as part of the court-approved punishment for his “atrocious crimes”.

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From today, visitors to the National Museum of Scotland can view Burke’s skeleton once again as it goes on public display for only the second time since the 1970s as part of a new exhibition, ‘Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life’, which charts the history of medicine’s quest to understand the human body.

William Burke was sentenced to execution by hanging and dissection as punishment for his crimes. His skeleton, normally kept at the anatomy museum at Edinburgh University, is now on display at the National Museum of Scotland

Crucially, it places Burke and Hare’s infamous “murders for profit” not just as the grim apotheosis in a supply-and-demand crisis which had already given rise to a boom trade in bodysnatching, but as a watershed moment in a 300-year explosion in dissections across Europe which had pitted rich against poor.

“Throughout, we’ve got this question of ‘where are the bodies coming from?’,” said Sophie Goggins, the museum’s senior curator for biomedical science.

“By the time we get to the 1800s it was executed criminals, but that was still not nearly enough for the amount of teaching that was going on. It becomes a struggle to teach anatomy, so the bodies had to be coming from somewhere.

“Unfortunately they were normally coming from the graves of the poor which were unprotected. But by no means were Burke and Hare a new problem.

"They just became very famous because they weren’t body-snatchers. They never dug up a grave.

"They were oddly specific about that in their confessions: ‘yes, we did murder people, but we definitely didn’t grave rob’.”

The exhibition, which has been five years in the making, begins with a series of intricate anatomical sketches drawn in the early 1500s by Leonardo Da Vinci - loaned from the Queen’s own collection and never before displayed in Scotland.

Da Vinci dissected around 30 human bodies in his lifetime, from a two-year-old boy to a man he visited in hospital in Florence hours before his death in 1507 who claimed to be over 100 years old.

The master wrote that he wanted “to see the cause of a death so sweet”.

His drawings were the first to show that the human heart had four chambers, not two, and he reproduced a likeness of the human foot down to all 26 bones.

Curator Sophie Goggins with illustrations by Leonardo Da Vinci, dating from the early 1500s, which are on display in Scotland for the first time

In the 16th Century, Padua in Italy and Leiden in the Netherlands emerged as centres of excellence for anatomy teaching - drawing students from across Europe, including Scotland, and opening the first anatomy theatres “where dissections were performed to large audiences”.

In 1726 Edinburgh University finally founded its own medical school, and in 1752 execution followed by anatomical dissection became the legal punishment for murder.

The success of medical teaching in Edinburgh generated a huge demand for dead bodies “which far outstripped the very limited official supply”.

As bodies fetched ever higher prices it became “common knowledge that many more bodies than those of murderers were taken for dissection, resulting in outrage and, occasionally, riots”, notes the exhibition.

Class divides quickly sprung up as “wealthier people, who had most access to the benefits of medical training, often considered this a price worth paying”.

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More affluent city residents also had the money to pay for ‘mortsafes’ - padlocked metal cases inside which coffins could be sealed until such time as their corpses were too decayed to be worth stealing, at which point they could safely exit the mortuary for their burial plot.

“For the poor, the only way to protect a grave was to hope family or friends would watch over it at night,” said Ms Goggins.

“But that wasn’t always possible, so it was predominantly the bodies of the poor that were taken.”

In some cases, graverobbers would bribe those keeping vigil “to look the other way” - or simply attack them.

Anatomists had their own incentives to turn a blind eye: lecturers “needed to acquire subjects for dissection in order to attract students and earn money”.

Some were known to hide corpses in cupboards if they were tipped off that the Edinburgh Town Guard (precursors to the police) were investigating a suspected grave robbery.

By 1826, the most successful anatomy lecturer in Edinburgh was Robert Knox, whose classes “attracted and enthused a large number of loyal students, thanks in part to his use of the largest number of bodies of any teacher in Edinburgh”.

Curator Dr Tacye Phillipson with the skeleton and death mask of William Burke

It was against this backdrop that Burke and Hare’s crimes unfolded.

On November 1, 1828, James and Ann Gray returned to the lodgings in the impoverished West Port area of Edinburgh which they had been sharing with Burke and his partner, Helen McDougal.

There, they discovered the body of a woman - later identified as Mary Docherty - concealed beneath straw bedding.

The couple claimed that McDougal and Margaret Hare - wife of William Hare - had tried to bribe them not to go to the police but, horrified, they raised the alarm.

When they returned with officers, however, the body had vanished - only to turn up 24 hours later in Knox’s anatomy rooms.

The anatomist denied any wrongdoing, insisting he had bought the corpse in the belief that she had died from natural causes.

Docherty, an Irishwoman, had come to Edinburgh to look for her son, but witnesses said they had seen her drinking with Burke and Hare on Halloween.

Her murder opened the floodgates; investigators became convinced that the pair - and their partners - were responsible for a string of disappearances in the West Port area.

In one particularly poignant case, witnesses described seeing Burke’s nephew wearing trousers belonging to a well-known local beggar, James Wilson, shortly after he vanished. Nicknamed ‘Daft Jamie’, the 18-year-old had been mentally disabled and walked with a limp due to deformed feet.

Many of Burke and Hare’s other victims were nameless: “unknown male”, “unknown female”. What little is known - “Effie (surname unknown)” - is memorialised on a wall of the exhibition.

In the end, only Burke was convicted. Hare turned “King’s evidence” - confessing to Docherty’s murder, and others, in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

Tens of thousands turned out to see William Burke hanged for his crimes in Edinburgh's Lawnmarket

He remains the only known mass murderer in UK legal history to be released without charge, but became a hate figure nonetheless: in the last reliable record of his whereabouts he was “being hounded out of Dumfries”.

Hare’s wife, Margaret, a suspected accomplice, avoided prosecution since a man could not testify against his wife, while the case against Helen McDougal - who stood trial with Burke - was found not proven.

Meanwhile, Knox - the enthusiastic recipient of all these corpses - was exonerated by a panel of fellow doctors.

Although he faced no criminal charges, his reputation never recovered from the suspicion that he had effectively bankrolled Burke and Hare’s killing spree.

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The saga ushered in the Anatomy Act of 1832 following pressure from medical students for an adequate, legal supply of bodies.

But, once again, the poor became the supply chain: under the new law, anyone whose body went unclaimed within 48 hours of them dying in a poorhouse, workhouse, prison, hospital, or asylum would be sold to anatomy schools.

Ms Goggins said: “These places had no legal requirement to tell your family, so even getting there in time would be tricky.

"Then your family needed to have money for a burial before they could claim your body back.

"Basically, instead of dissection being a punishment for being a criminal, it became a punishment for being poor.”

Only with the advent of the NHS did the donation of bodies for medical science become more common.

Scotland now has some of the strictest rules on body donation in the world, with many people drawing comfort from “giving back” - and from the respect today’s anatomy schools show these “silent teachers”.

This was summed up in a moving video account at the end of the exhibition featuring Joyce Faulkner, whose late husband bequested his body to Edinburgh medical school. He was treated, she said, “not as just some body, but as somebody”.

‘Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life’ runs from July 2 to October 30 at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh